25 Things You Didn’t Know About Interview With The Vampire
10. Anne Rice Was Convinced Hollywood Was Homophobic
Although her vampires can’t have literal, physical sex, Anne Rice’s novels are rich with sexual subtext, most of which revolves around characters identifying as male.
Over the many years that Interview With The Vampire languished in development hell, Rice became convinced that the reason that an adaptation had never gotten off the ground was that her work had too much of a homoerotic context for 1980s Hollywood - in the original novel, Louis and Lestat are lovers in all but deed, and Claudia is their daughter.
Rice put her suspicion to the test by reworking the draft of her screenplay to have the mortal Louis mourning the death of his wife and child rather than his brother, thereby establishing him as heterosexual and therefore unthreatening.